How do you choose riders so the team has variety?

This is a discussion every year, and we haven’t really found the answer. A lot of people put in a lot of work to get competitive teams, and it seems to fail every year.

Some people ride consistently year round. Some people do a lot extra for BAFS. Some, like my wife, ride year round but only bother with Strava during BAFS.

If you have a brilliant idea to ensure maximum competitiveness right up to the last day of the competition, we’d love it hear it. Some year my hope is for it to come down to three or four teams desperately sprinting around Hains Point right up to the stroke of midnight at the Freezing Saddles Last Night Hains Point Party.

I think there is a question about daily or yearly mileage. But it’s hard to distinguish between, say, someone who does the trainer all winter and then century rides every weekend when it’s nice, and someone who rides every day for transportation but never more than 15 miles in a day.

It’s not random (although that has been suggested). Currently chuxtr is the arbiter of the Super Secret Algorithm of Team Choosing. He wasn’t the first, and is unlikely to be the last.

Friends don’t enter into it – you can request to be on a local team, but I think that’s DC vs VA vs MD, not you and your 10 buddies.

And then there’s the discussion about what the actual goal of this whole thing is. Do we want to maximize everyone’s mileage, meaning we need all the teams competitive? Do we want to maximize participation in the side games, meaning the competition is fine but it’s not the focus? Do we want to encourage as many people as possible to ride through the winter and find out that, with a bit of the right gear, it’s totally doable for normal people in all but the worst weather? The answer to “what is the point of BAFS” varies wildly among participants.

@Shabooya 203257 wrote:

What a dream!

Not trying to reinvent the wheel here. But I am curious to know what has been tried in the past.

Too late for this year (or is it?), but have y’all ever done something like adding a question to the sign up page that gives you an idea of their typical mileage? Maybe everyone chooses a number between 1-5 where 5 would be riders who typically go 70+ miles all the way down to 1 who are riders that ride less than 5 miles a ride. Possibly also factoring in how many times a week they typically ride. And then each team gets 1-5 types of riders.

That’s if all teams are compiled randomly. I’m assuming people want to be on teams with their friends especially if they’ve been doing this for a while.

Does enthusiasm typically wane further into the competition?

We have traditionally checked last year’s mileage (for people who participated the prior year) and asked people about their mileage (for those who didn’t). Teams were then formed so that each team had approximately equal predicted mileage. So if you wanted to help your team, a premium was put on riding more than you did last year (or more than you usually do), as opposed to riding more miles than anyone else. That gave even the riders with the lowest usual mileage an incentive to do a little better.

We pretty much agreed this year that we should be using points instead of mileage for that purpose in future years. If we just count mileage, the person who bikes 20 miles every Saturday gets counted the same as one who bikes 4 miles a day, 5 days a week. But the former person would get 75 points a week, while the latter would get 220. So it makes more sense to create teams based on points rather than mileage.

However, this year we decided to just do random assignments, other than making sure each team had one of the top riders from last year, each had one of the bottom riders from last year, and each had at least one newbie. The reason was that we believed that last year’s mileage/points would be of no use in predicting this year’s. The person who commuted daily last year may now be working from home. The person who took the bus/subway to work last year may now be riding a bike to avoid contact with other people. The person who was working full-time last year and had no time to ride may now be unemployed and spending a lot of time riding as distraction. The people who ride a century every weekend just for fun and the people who don’t dare venture out if it’s under 40 degrees may be the same as last year, but everyone else’s mileage is unpredictable.

@Shabooya 203273 wrote:

As for wanting to be on a team with people on your side of the border…was that more for pre-pandemic meetups/group rides/potential new local friends? What would be the point now, or before, if it wasn’t any of the ones I listed?

Yes, the idea was that meetups and getting to know people were more likely if you didn’t have people from Greenbelt and people from Alexandria on the same team. I would think it less critical this year. But I would expect that at least some teams will do things like socially distanced group rides–and those are easier if you don’t have to bike 40 miles even to get to the ride.

@Mtansill 203286 wrote:

Yes, just as an aside. I, for one, will likely not join in larger group rides that are far from home (such as in Virginia) this year, because I don’t anticipate wanting to use metro in case I want to bail. The last two years I freely used metro for part of my commute when the roads were dicey, too. Anyway, the point is that logistics are going to be different this year for some of us, that’s for sure.

Yep, one more reason for having local teams.